my experience with sociological science

I published my second paper in Sociological Science last week (first paper here). I’ve had a great experience with them both times: what they say about quick, no-bulls**t turnaround is absolutely true. Two things that I might not have anticipated about publishing there:

1. Despite the stuff about how the journal evaluates papers and doesn’t mentor them, for both papers, we still got useful feedback in the process of acceptance that led to revisions that strengthened the papers. It wasn’t very much feedback, and certainly not the laundry list of this-and-that one gets from reviewers, but it was a couple of incisive points that were correct and which I found myself wanting to address.

2. I don’t know who SocSci found as their copy editor, but the person is crazy good. For the paper that just came out, it was thoroughly copy edited with a lot of little things getting caught or changed, and yet I did not do one single STET. My usual experience with copy-editors is that they are either so superficial that they may as well be a bot, or they are intrusive in ways that lead to a lot of annoyance and STET-ing.

I’m very excited about Sociological Science more generally, and I’m pleased it is doing so well. I fell in love with the idea from the whatever was the first draft of the mission statement that I read. What I loved was that the statement offered a number of different innovations, but they were all guided by a single priority: what would a sociology journal look like if pushing social inquiry forward was the only thing that mattered?